The fat man cleared his throat. “Mrs. Grimes, I’ve just spoken with your real-estate agent—”
“I know all that,” she snapped. “Aaron’s a fool. All the more for letting you come here with the notion of changing my mind. I’m too old for changing my mind, Mr. Waterbury.”
“Er — well, I don’t know if that was my intention, Mrs. Grimes. I thought we’d just — talk a little.”
She leaned back, and the rocker groaned. “Talk’s free. Say what you like.”
“Yes.” He mopped his face again, and shoved the handkerchief only halfway back into his pocket. “Well, let me put it this way, Mrs. Grimes. I’m a business man — a bachelor. I’ve worked for a long time, and I’ve made a fair amount of money. Now I’m ready to retire — preferably, somewhere quiet. I like Ivy Corners. I passed through here some years back, on my way to — er, Albany. I thought, one day, I might like to settle here.”
“So?”
“So, when I drove through your town today, and saw this house — I was enthused. It just seemed — right for me.”
“I like it too, Mr. Waterbury. That’s why I’m asking a fair price for it.”
Waterbury blinked. “Fair price? You’ll have to admit, Mrs. Grimes, these days a house like this shouldn’t cost more than—”
“That’s enough!” the old woman cried. “I told you, Mr. Waterbury — I don’t want to sit here all day and argue with you. If you won’t pay my price, then we can forget all about it.”
“But, Mrs. Grimes—”
“Good day, Mr. Waterbury!”
She stood up, indicating that he was expected to do the same.
But he didn’t. “Wait a moment, Mrs. Grimes,” he said, “just a moment. I know it’s crazy, but — all right. I’ll pay what you want.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “Are you sure, Mr. Waterbury?”
“Positive! I’ve enough money. If that’s the only way you’ll have it, that’s the way it’ll be.”
She smiled thinly. “I think that lemonade’ll be cold enough. I’ll bring you some — and then I’ll tell you something about this house.”
He was mopping his brow when she returned with the tray. He gulped at the frosty yellow beverage greedily.
“This house,” she said, easing back in her rocker, “has been in my family since eighteen hundred and two. It was built some fifteen years before that. Every member of the family, except my son, Michael, was born in the bedroom upstairs. I was the only rebel,” she added raffishly. “I had new-fangled ideas about hospitals.” Her eyes twinkled.
“I know it’s not the most solid house in Ivy Corners. After I brought Michael home, there was a flood in the basement, and we never seemed to get it dry since. Aaron tells me that there are termites, too, but I’ve never seen the pesky things. I love the old place, though; you understand.”
“Of course,” Waterbury said.
“Michael’s father died when Michael was nine. It was hard times on us then. I did some needlework, and my own father had left me the small annuity which supports me today. Not in very grand style, but I manage. Michael missed his father, perhaps even more than I. He grew up to be — well, wild is the only word that comes to mind.”
The fat man clucked, sympathetically.
“When he graduated from high school, Michael left Ivy Corners and went to the city. Against my wishes, make no mistake. But he was like so many young men; full of ambition, undirected ambition. I don’t know what he did in the city. But he must have been successful — he sent me money regularly.” Her eyes clouded. “I didn’t see him for nine years.”
“Ah,” the man sighed, sadly.
“Yes, it wasn’t easy for me. But it was even worse when Michael came home because, when he did, he was in trouble.”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t know how bad the trouble was. He showed up in the middle of the night, looking thinner and older than I could have believed possible. He had no luggage with him, only a small black suitcase. When I tried to take it from him, he almost struck me. Struck me — his own mother!
“I put him to bed myself, as if he was a little boy again. I could hear him crying out during the night.
“The next day, he told me to leave the house. Just for a few hours — he wanted to do something, he said. He didn’t explain what. But when I returned that evening, I noticed that the little black suitcase was gone.”
The fat man’s eyes widened over the lemonade glass.
“What did it mean?” he asked.
“I didn’t know then. But I found out soon — too terribly soon. That night, a man came to our house. I don’t even know how he got in. I first knew when I heard voices in Michael’s room. I went to the door, and tried to listen, tried to find out what sort of trouble my boy was in. But I heard only shouts and threats, and then…”
She paused, and her shoulders sagged.
“And a shot,” she continued, “a gunshot. When I went into the room, I found the bedroom window open, and the stranger gone. And Michael — he was on the floor. He was dead.”
The chair creaked.
“That was five years ago,” she said. “Five long years. It was a while before I realized what had happened. The police told me the story. Michael and this other man had been involved in a crime, a serious crime. They had stolen many, many thousands of dollars.
“Michael had taken that money, and run off with it, wanting to keep it all for himself. He hid it somewhere in this house — to this very day I don’t know where. Then the other man came looking for my son, came to collect his share. When he found the money gone, he — he killed my boy.”
She looked up. “That’s when I put the house up for sale, at seventy-five thousand dollars. I knew that, someday, my son’s killer would return. Someday, he would want this house at any price. All I had to do was wait until I found the man willing to pay much too much for an old lady’s house.”
She rocked gently.
Waterbury put down the empty glass and licked his lips, his eyes no longer focusing, his head rolling loosely on his shoulders.
“Ugh!” he said. “This lemonade is bitter.”
THREE WIVES TOO MANY
by KENNETH FEARING
1
Richard C. Brown gazed in contented speculation across the breakfast table at the plain but pleasant face of his wife Marion. He was aware not only of her companionable silence, but savored also the cozy perfection of the tiny alcove, in fact, the homey restfulness of the entire bungalow.
For a moment, he almost regretted the need to leave this suburban idyll on the outskirts of Camden, and Marion, in order to reach his home in Newark by nightfall, and to be with Bernice, his fourth and most recent wife, at the usual hour. But he knew that domestic peace, to say nothing of his own safety, depended upon the most rigid adherence to his fixed routine.
Bernice, a natural and vivacious blonde, was much younger and very much prettier than Marion, whose tightly combed hair showed an unmistakable tinge of gray in its otherwise inky darkness. Marion, in fact, was the wife Richard had who was as old as himself. When he married her, he had rather felt he was making a reckless gamble.
But now, after four years — no, come to think of it, five years — he felt she had turned out extraordinarily well. Whereas Bernice, he had to face it, still couldn’t cook, after almost a year of marriage. Her cooking, like her disorderly housekeeping, would probably never improve.
Still, she was lively, and decorative, though by no means as gorgeous as the ripe, still magnificently cream-skinned and red-haired Lucille. Lucille was his first wife, and although nowadays she was showing more and more ill temper, especially when she drank, he was still very fond of her, and they still maintained their original home in Hartford.